The teams in the 2025 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition have distinguished themselves in their excellent advocacy. Many thanks to John Caucutt and Daniel Underwood and the Marquette Moot Court Association for organizing the competition well. We appreciate all the judges who grade briefs and come to the Law School to hear the oral arguments; we could not host this competition without their assistance.
The following teams advanced to the quarterfinal round:
Team 9 – Sydney Kojis and Mikayla Collins
Team 10 – Elizabeth Hansen and Rachel Sweet
Team 19 – Ava Mares and George Certalic
Team 28 – Reese Gee and Anna Pyle
Team 36 – Mario Hernandez and Isabella Gonzalez
Team 40 – Isabella Barnard and Ananda Deacon
Team 41 – William Welder and Aaron Steines
Team 51 – Connor Reed and Suzy DeGuire
The competition was especially fierce at the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds. Two teams—William Welder and Aaron Steines, and Connor Reed and Suzy DeGuire—emerged successfully from those rounds and will compete on Tuesday evening at the Lubar Center.
The event’s keynote speaker, Dr. Marin Skidmore of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, presented the findings of her team’s study of the effectiveness of local (county-level) regulations targeted at controlling nonpoint source pollution from Wisconsin dairy farms. As Dr. Skidmore explained, by definition nonpoint source pollution does not emanate from a single point; rather, it typically consists of diffuse runoff across broad landscapes. In the case of agriculture, that runoff may carry with it fertilizer or manure that has been applied to farm fields and deposit those pollutants in surface waters. Agriculture is a major economic and cultural force in the state, she acknowledged, but it also often creates serious water quality problems resulting from the “enormous nutrient [manure] output coming from dairy production.” That can impact recreational activities and even public health, she said.
Skidmore and her team set out to find a way to test Wisconsin’s efforts to manage the pollution’s impacts while maintaining an industry so important to the state. Nonpoint source pollution is exceedingly difficult to control. It isn’t well regulated under federal or state laws, including the Clean Water Act, Skidmore said, partly because “we don’t have a reliable way to map and quantify the amount of pollution coming from one single farm.” As a result, policy makers can’t use traditional regulatory tools such as command-and-control regulation, pollution taxes, or a cap-and-trade system.
But there is hope, Skidmore said, because “Wisconsin is innovative.” Its leaders have tried solutions that other states haven’t. Skidmore cited the state’s farmer-led watershed groups, farmland preservation program, and water quality trading program as examples. But the program that most captured the attention of Skidmore and her research team was the state government’s decision to delegate the option to regulate manure management to county governments – a program unheard of in other states. The delegation was intended not as a substitute for state authority, but as a complement or addition to it. Perhaps the counties could serve as “laboratories of democracy” for the state, in the same way that the states have sometimes done for the federal government.
So what happened when counties got involved in writing and enforcing local manure management ordinances? By comparing many different county ordinances – and the resulting water quality benefits (or lack thereof) – Skidmore’s team found that some aspects of the ordinances had a measurable impact on water quality, while others did not. The most significant positive impact on water quality resulted from adding a requirement that farmers prepare a “nutrient management plan.” That effectively means a plan for the rate, timing, and method of nutrient application to farm fields. If farmers fine-tune those variables, they can dramatically reduce pollutant runoff to surface waters, Skidmore said, because a lot of the problem comes from nutrient overapplication above what the crop needs. That leaves the excess nutrients vulnerable to precipitation-induced runoff.
Developing a nutrient management plan can be a “light bulb moment” for some farmers, Skidmore found. It can significantly adjust their behavior in the near term and even save them money by decreasing the amounts of fertilizer applied to the fields. And because the state has offered some funding to incentivize the development of the plans, the process can be a win-win for farmers and the environment
Following Skidmore’s presentation, a panel of Wisconsin experts offered their own perspectives on the interface between agriculture and water quality.
Brian Weigel, the Deputy Administrator for the Division of External Services at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, noted that state governments have sometimes been caught in the middle of struggles between farmers, affected citizens, and environmentalists. “There are myriad opportunities for change,” he said, but that won’t happen until the various factions move forward together. DNR is trying to do its part, he said, by developing an office of agriculture and water quality with two goals: trying to communicate effectively with stakeholders, and connecting with governmental partners in neighboring agricultural states to explore best practices for science and policy. But government won’t have sufficient resources to do it alone, he predicted; society and culture need to change, with consumers demanding more sustainably-produced food, to really drive reforms.
“Farmers are the original environmentalists,” because they see firsthand the impacts of pollution on nearby drinking water sources, said Jason Mugnaini, Executive Director of Government Relations at the Wisconsin Farm Bureau. Mugnaini predicted that the farm community in the state will soon enter a time of transition, with farmers open to new conservation practices in part because of government-funded incentive programs. He conceded, though, that some farmers are afraid to seek compliance assistance because of concerns over enforcement actions that might result.
Sara Walling, the Water and Agriculture Program Director at Clean Wisconsin, an environmental advocacy group that has often squared off in litigation with agricultural interests over water quality concerns, emphasized the need for a collaborative approach that includes both famers and affected citizens. “We recognize that there are a lot of farmers out there who are very interested in doing what they can to change the impacts they are having on water quality,” she said. Part of Clean Wisconsin’s role is helping to bridge some of the gaps in understanding the impacts of agriculture on water quality, Walling stated.
Cheryl Heilman, the DNR’s Chief Legal Counsel, reiterated that the agency’s focus is on protecting water quality. Existing laws aren’t enough to solve the problem, and even regulation at the county level has sometimes created a “patchwork” of requirements, with some very effective and others not. Like the other panelists, she emphasized the need for more mutual support among the factions. What can best drive such cooperation? “I think we should have more forums like this,” she said.
To the weary descending traveler, the two post-industrial cities on the shore of a Great Lake share enough superficial similarity to induce panic in the first-time visitor, but Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, also share a more profound legacy. They both exemplify a historical theme in American criminal jurisprudence: a recurring (if episodic) commitment to reforming and improving imperfect systems of social control in a democratic republic.
I believe that my laying a historical foundation can help me present reforms attempted in Milwaukee in the past 20 years. I also intend, in a subsequent post, to link those efforts to reform efforts around the country.
The groundbreaking 1922 Cleveland Crime Survey and the creation of the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council in 2007 are separated by 85 years but motivated by similar social forces and dynamics challenging the fair administration of justice. The persistence of these challenges and of the efforts to do better reflect the hope that citizens place in the genuine and perceived power of the state to regulate a complex society. Yet it also raises a question about the limitations of the law as the primary vehicle of that regulation.
Over 100 years ago, Felix Frankfurter, Harvard law professor and future U.S. Supreme Court justice, wrote the preface for a report titled Criminal Justice in Cleveland. This was a detailed 700-page examination of Cleveland’s justice process, commissioned by the non-government Cleveland Foundation, which had invited leading national legal experts and scholars to conduct an independent examination of the inner workings of the scandal-ridden Cleveland justice system. The incident itself seems strangely contemporary, as it involved reckless intoxicated driving, a fatal shooting, and compromised witnesses. What made it exceptional was that a perpetrator was the judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court, responsible for adjudicating criminal matters.
Frankfurter wrote:
For some time previous to this survey Cleveland had been restive under a growing feeling of insecurity of life and property. The fifth largest city in the country entertained a wide-spread conviction of its failure in the most primitive function of government. In the spring of 1920 this feeling was brought to a head. An atrocious and sordid crime, implicating the chief judge of the city’s municipal courts, stirred to action dormant civic pride. With rare self-restraint and self-knowledge the leaders of the community realized that the city had the feeling, but not the understanding, for action. They had the insight to realize that this sensational case was but symptomatic of deeper causes. In a word, a problem in social sanitation and social engineering was presented. Therefore, in the winter of 1920, a number of civic organizations, headed by the Cleveland Bar Association, requested the Cleveland Foundation to undertake a survey of the administration of criminal justice in Cleveland.
The yearlong examination resulted in a report: Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Samuel Walker, in Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, described the entity that prepared the report as “the single most important crime commission” in American history. “It established the model of examining a complete criminal-justice system and was copied by numerous state and federal crime commissions,” Walker explained. “The co-directors of the Cleveland survey were two of the most significant figures in the history of American law: Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter.”
In fact, the now-reflexive habit of speaking of the criminal justice process as a system arguably dates from this 1922 report. As Walker has noted, the report also had the salient effect of unmasking for the first time the reality and pervasiveness of plea bargaining in the justice system.
The Cleveland study broke down and examined the critical decision points of the city’s justice apparatus progressively: closely examining police, prosecutors, judges, defense bar, corrections, juvenile justice, forensic sciences, and even the role of the press. It then made constructive recommendations on how to improve the system.
Roscoe Pound’s ending summation in the report is titled “Criminal Justice in The American City” and is fascinating reading that would be instructive for every participant in criminal law administration today. What stands out in the 1922 examination is how many of the dynamics present at that time are with us today. Hear Pound:
We may say that the three chief factors in the administration of justice are—(1) the men by whom it is administered; (2) the machinery of legal and political institutions by means of which they administer justice; and (3) the environment in which they do so. One who surveys the workings of a legal system with these three things in mind will not go far wrong.
[¶] Yet his picture will not be complete nor wholly accurate. He must take account also of certain practical limitations and practical difficulties inherent in the legal ordering of human relations, at least by any legal institutions thus far devised. The purposes of law, as we know them, and the very nature of legal institutions as we have received and fashioned them, involve certain obstacles to our doing everything which we should like to do by means thereof, and even to our doing well many things which we have been trying to do thereby for generations. These practical limitations on effective legal action explain much that, on a superficial view, is ascribed to bad men or bad legal machinery.
[¶] Hence a fourth factor must be added, namely, (4) the bounds within which the law may function effectively as a practical system.
The report exposed an overburdened criminal docket, chaotic court environment, uninterested and disengaged prosecutors, inadequately trained police, an unprofessional defense bar, and a lack of any objective rigor in the forensic sciences. The report’s approach enhanced awareness of the criminal justice process as an ecosystem, where each component of the system influenced, and in turn was influenced by, the system’s other parts.
The problems in Cleveland were not unique. The system troubles examined in Cleveland were also present in the Milwaukee Municipal Court system of the era: consider a 1922 grand jury investigation involving corrupt practices in the district attorney’s office and the court systems. The proliferation of crime commissions following the Cleveland survey demonstrate that many other cities shared similar attributes.
Fast forward, if you will, to 2007. The convening and creation of the Milwaukee County Community Justice Council that year was similarly driven by experienced community and system participants who shared, in Frankfurter’s words, “the feeling, but not the understanding, for action.”
To be more precise, there was a generalized understanding that Milwaukee County’s criminal justice system needed to change in four important ways:
How we treated the drug-addicted
How we treated the mentally ill
How we treated traumatized people
How we treated people in our detention facilities
Unifying those four areas of concern was the strong perception that Black Milwaukeeans were disproportionately present in the system as defendants and victims.
Three significant events of the time helped form that “feeling.” First was the savage off-duty police beating of Frank Jude in 2004; second, a court’s ruling that the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office was noncompliant with a consent decree requiring improved jail conditions (the Christensen decree); and, finally, the pending release of a national study showing that Wisconsin had the second highest incarceration rate for Blacks in the nation.
There was less understanding of how to accomplish change. While Milwaukee justice leaders certainly would have benefited from a review of Cleveland’s historical template, the path to reform is perhaps better described as a confluence of several organic relationships with events that occurred in 2006, merging in 2007 to support the creation of what is now known as the Milwaukee Community Justice Council (CJC).
For one thing, 2006 was a transitional year, with Milwaukee County’s first open-seat election for district attorney since 1968. During that year as a candidate, I spent significant time talking to practitioners such as Tom Reed, the regional manager of the State Public Defender’s Office; criminal defense attorney Craig Mastantuono; and community members including Kit McNally, Reverand Joe Ellwanger, and members of the Community Brainstorming Conference such as Dr. Pam Malone.
So much was flowing together. My colleague Jeff Altenburg was working in the D.A.’s office as a community prosecutor, and my soon-to-be Chief Deputy Kent Lovern was on the boards of both the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Sojourner Family Peace Center (as it is now known). E. Michael McCann, in his last year as district attorney, invited me to join him in a discussion with the Vera Institute of Justice about conducting the first internal review of data from a D.A.’s office focused on racial disparity. In addition, in 2006 the Milwaukee County Circuit Court found that the Sheriff’s Office was not in compliance with the Christensen consent decree requiring improvement in jail conditions for pretrial detainees.
All these streams—and any number of others—came together after the election, in 2007, when we gathered system leaders ostensibly to address the problems in the jail through regular convening. The Milwaukee County Community Justice Council (here’s an early profile in 2011) could have been a limited-term, narrowly focused exercise to reduce jail overcrowding and improve jail conditions. In fact, in part because of the relationships formed during those crucial months, the CJC instead was converted into a vehicle for data-informed, practical, best-practice reform even beyond taking on the need for improved conditions in the jail.
The succeeding years saw the CJC deliberately invite numerous external academic and public policy groups to help examine and implement better policy in the Milwaukee County judicial system. The list is impressive and continues to this day. Some examples: The Wisconsin Policy Forum helped us envision a screening process for everyone arrested and brought to jail; a visit by the chief judge of the Buffalo (New York) drug treatment and veterans’ court resulted in the launching of a Milwaukee program shortly afterwards. The National Institute of Corrections accepted us in a competitive bid to implement an evidence-based decision-making (EBDM) framework to inform us of our intake procedure to deflect people with drug, alcohol and mental health issues. The Arnold Foundation helped develop a risk-assessment tool, and the Homicide Review Commission was brought into the CJC. The District Attorney’s Office completed a first in the nation study in a D.A.’s office of race and charging, with the Vera Institute, and was enrolled in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge. (The list goes on, to include such developments as convening the Emergency Operation Center for COVID, which transformed into the current Violence Reduction Public Health and Safety Team, and the opening of Sojourner Family Peace and the Alma Center, etc.)
The linkage among the four problem areas I described above seems obvious today. We have come a long way as a community and nation to understand that trauma, mental health, addiction, and poverty are all closely correlated. We still have a long way to go in implementing effective solutions outside the criminal justice system. In subsequent posts, I hope to expand in more detail upon the reforms initiated by the CJC and examine what worked, what didn’t work and what the future may hold.
Any report prefaced by Felix Frankfurter and concluded by a summary from Roscoe Pound should, I believe, at least occasionally be dusted off and revisited. My colleagues have often heard me say that stored energy—the energy that comes from analysis, deliberation, and review—is important, but kinetic energy, even if imperfectly released, creates change. The 1922 Cleveland report is the kind of stored energy that the academy expertly creates so that practitioners can release the energy of reform in a focused, purposeful, examined manner. The Community Justice Council—at its best—is the mechanism for kinetic change.
